Month: November 2012

I’m Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

Any who’ve listened to this program for any length of time will know that I’m not much for relativity. As in, relative truth. Although that’s a new stance for me, picked up over my 11 years of work at Norberto Keppe‘s International Society of Analytical Trilogy in Brazil.

“I have my truth, and you have yours,” is a pretty common point of view from the New Age Movement, which seeks validation from the proposals of quantum physics that there’s an unlimited offering of possibilities before us, and it’s our choice that determines which one becomes reality.

It’s an enticing idea: I am a co-creator of the Universe and therefore essential to its evolution.

Except that this idea disappears in the spotlight of Keppean metaphysics that proclaims that we are complete beings, not becomings at all. That we are, not that we are on the way.

This holds true for society as well. Society has an essential and perfect nature that we have degraded considerably. Although now, we have a science to help us return to the natural state.

These powerful declarations echo through time, but always seem current. Can there be anything more relevant than freedom? Stacked up against the social justice implied by liberty, our blind focus on monetary self-interest seems petty and pathetic. In the face of the grand ambitions of the human soul, our typical daily strivings pale in comparison.

But for all its power and resonance, freedom in real terms seems dauntingly difficult to achieve. That’s easy to see in places where freedom is blatantly restricted, but even in the so-called free world of the west, true freedom as Christ and King and Kennedy called for has eluded us.

Perhaps this is because we have confused freedom with being free to do whatever we want – and that, in Keppe’s psychological view, is fraught with peril.